Since the video card needs some ram to serve its normal purpose, so you need to do some calculations. The offsets are easy to calculate as powers of 2. The card should use the begining of the address range as framebuffer, textures etc. when limited (otherwise you get X11 crashing).

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Since the video card needs some ram to serve its normal purpose, so you need to do some calculations. The offsets are easy to calculate as powers of 2. The card should use the beginning of the address range as framebuffer, textures etc. when limited (otherwise you get X11 crashing).

Revision as of 15:00, 7 February 2011

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Warning: unless your X11 driver can be made to use less ram than exists (can be detected) your X server will tend to crash when you try to use the same section of RAM to store textures (even Qt does it) as swap. Using a video driver that allows you to override videoram should increase stability (vga and radeon (xf86-video-ati) do at least). Even then, you or I might have made mistakes and you can still get crashes or freezes (that don't listen to ctrl-alt-backspace; use the magic sysrq).

Contents

Why Do it

The fast memory on your graphics card (if you have one) can be used as general ram (actually swap) by using the MTD subsystem of the kernel. If you have lots of videoram (256 MiB) this can increase system responsiveness (if you have around 256 MiB main ram too :).

Agp has slow reads; ~8 M/s. Making this less desirable.

How To

Kernel Stuff

MTD is now included in kernel26 as of 2.6.23.1-6.

Post-Kernel Stuff

When you are running a kernel with MTD modules, you have to load the modules specifying the pci address ranges that correspond to the ram on your video card.

check the ranges with

lspci -vvv

Then you look for the sections that name your video card as an example mine is here:

Since the video card needs some ram to serve its normal purpose, so you need to do some calculations. The offsets are easy to calculate as powers of 2. The card should use the beginning of the address range as framebuffer, textures etc. when limited (otherwise you get X11 crashing).

Example: total 2^28 bytes (256M) videoram, leaving 2^24 (32M) for the normal function (less will work fine)
The start range, is 2^24 bytes more than the start of the pci address range shown by lspci -vvv.

The end is your total minus the amount you left for the card.

Load the modules in /etc/rc.conf

MODULES=(otherModulesYouNeed slram mtdblock)

In /etc/rc.local

mkswap /dev/mtdblock0 && swapon /dev/mtdblock0 -p 10 #higher priority

Add this to /etc/modprobe.conf

options slram map=VRAM,0xStartRange,+0xUsedAmount

Xorg Driver Config

To keep X stable, your video driver needs to be told to use less than the detected videoram. In the Device section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf the declaration